archeological artefacts – Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive

Exhibition dates: 1st May – 13th June 2009

Natasha Dusenjko (Australian)
Towers of Babel
2009
Mixed media

Three very interesting exhibitions at Craft Victoria at the moment: Babel by Natasha Dusenjko, Gleaning Potential by Simon Lloyd and Cycle by Liz Low. I particularly liked the delicacy and textuality of Natasha Dusenjko’s sci-fi towers and bone fragments and the wonderful box of 6 red bricks (small and large) that you can buy from the Simon Lloyd show, like blocks for a child builder.

There is an excellent and erudite review of the exhibitions at Daniel Neville’s Nevolution website.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

.
Many thankx to Craft Victoria for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“The two tables allow for different meanings and scales when viewed in opposition. Table 1 alludes to star charts; constellations of texts hinting at importance, especially in relation to the placement of towers. The map looking up to the stars via the towers of babel, communicating unknown messages to the stars above. The cold stark forms of the towers work well with the organic forms of the bones on Table 2. Perfectly ordered and numbered archaeological bone fragments repeat the textual ciphers and codes, meticulously ordered. The jump in scale between the architectural and the archaeological is lovely; each hinting at an underlying language and mythology. Meanwhile both contain elements of each other – the towers of rationality have been placed in a seemingly random manner, while the organic forms of the bones have been laid out in perfect order ranging down in sizes.”

.
Daniel Neville. Extract from “On the nature of language, order and decay,” on the Nevolution website June 03, 2009 [Online] Cited 05/06/2009

Installation views of Natasha Dusenjko’s exhibition Babel at Craft Victoria, Melbourne

Babel is a word-based collection of fine porcelain and paper works. This collection of short texts constitutes a series of incantations, codes and instructions scrolled around porcelain bones or thin spines. The porcelain bones are internal structures and vessels of ancestor memory. This memory is fluid, is evasive, is aquatic. The thin spines resemble futuristic Towers of Babel reaching into space, anticipating communication and new frontiers. These towers have either an upright or collapsed form.

In the making, both forms build toward new possibility, words become obscured, resulting in a non-defined beginning or end, now replaced by chance permutations of the accumulated text.

The sculptural works are deliberately placed onto two large scale text based charts. Each chart is placed on a raised surface, analogous to work benches in an observatory or laboratory suggesting a process of decipherment. Map 1 exhibits a similarity to ancient star charts, the placement of towers alluding to significant points of a constellation. The accompanying Chart 2 resembles an organised series of archeological artefacts, each piece methodically numbered and labelled.

Ultimately, Babel evokes a spiral passage both outward and inward. To unravel the scrolls initiates a return to the spine – the axis mundi, the source of a universal native tongue – love.

Text from the Craft Victoria website [Online] 05/06/2009 on longer available online